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Five new homes are being built in the Mountain Creek Village subdivision just outside Andrews.
Cherokee County real estate is booming, and there’s no signs of the seller’s market slowing down soon.
“The average sale price is about $100,000 more than our tax value,” Tax Administrator Eddie Allen said after analyzing about 70 sales that took place in the last month.
Resales and new construction homes alike are selling for prices above the last property appraisals, which are based on the 2020 revaluation. Officials attribute the relatively high sale prices to the limited housing inventory and rise in costs of building materials brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition, from January through March this year, 65 permits were issued for brand new single-family dwellings, a 27 percent increase compared to that same time last year and a 51 percent increase compared to the first three months of 2019.
“There is a human migration that is happening right now,” real estate developer Robin Sargent of Andrews said. “In America five or 10 years ago, people were going back to inner cities. That’s completely out the window now.
“I think we have mentally shocked people with what has happened over the last couple years. They don’t want to live in cities; they want to be in safe places.”
While a migration to western North Carolina is good for the local tax base,
Cherokee County is not in a position to fully capitalize on the opportunity due to a housing shortage. Moreover, there are not enough builders operating in the county to replenish the properties that sell.
“There are starter homes, workforce housing, vacation houses and senior housing – we have a deficit of all those,” Sargent said. “There’s very little inventory for people wanting to buy a vacation home.
“Last week within our MLS, there wasn’t a single cabin available on a creek or a river in Cherokee, Graham or Clay counties. That is a stunning fact in an area that is full of rivers.”
According to the National Association of Realtors, second home sales in western North Carolina increased 81 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020, compared to the last three months of 2019. Roughly 27 percent of Cherokee County’s housing stock is used seasonally, recreationally, or occasionally, making it one of the top-ranked vacation home counties in America.
However, the high ranking doesn’t exactly bring good tidings. With less than 80 percent of homes being used full time and not enough builders to develop workforce housing, the county is struggling to fill job openings.
Today, there are at least 300 job openings within a 10-mile radius of downtown Murphy.
“Every third call I get is from a company looking for employees,” said Paul Worley, director of economic and workforce development for Cherokee County. “Labor has been a real struggle.”
In addition, the vacation home numbers translate to “vacant homes” in the U.S. Census, which makes developers question whether it would be profitable to build in Cherokee County.
“When we get a developer in here, they ask us [about those vacant home census numbers] point blank, and we have to explain it away and prove to them that [the statistic] is not necessarily true,” Worley said.
To combat the lack of developers willing to build apartment complexes and other workforce housing projects in Cherokee County, Sargent is working with local residents interested in developing small sub-divisions.
Mountain Creek Village has more than 29 lots just outside the Andrews town limits. Construction started on five new homes about 40 days ago, and most of them are already under contract.
“Most of the realtors in my office pitched in to fund building the homes; it’s our own version of crowdsourced effort,” Sargent said. “A lot of people say, ‘This [real estate boom] is going to bust; it’s a bubble.’ But it’s not a bubble because bubbles happen when you have too much of something and it pops. Here, there’s nothing to pop.
“If this real estate market was a store, the shelves would be almost empty.”
While he’s trying to attract general contractors to develop housing in Cherokee County, Sargent emphasizes the need to encourage local high school graduates to pursue careers within construction trades.
“We need to train our students in the field of construction so they can build homes for the youth that want to move here,” Sargent said. “This could fulfill our need for a construction workforce and simultaneously meet the demand from a younger population looking to relocate into those new homes, both of which will sustain the county over the years to come.”